Hunter Humen -Resources Consulting Ltd. inappropriately duplicated information about job opportunities from the web sites of other companies and thereby engaged in clearly unfair acts of deception capable of affecting the trading order.
Case:
Hunter Humen -Resources Consulting Ltd. inappropriately duplicated information about job opportunities from the web sites of other companies and thereby engaged in clearly unfair acts of deception capable of affecting the trading order.
Key Words:
extraction, reproduction, free ride, job bank
Reference:
Fair Trade Commission Decision of April 26, 2000 (the 442nd Commissioners' Meeting); Disposition (89) Kung Ch'u Tzu No. 063
Industry:
Information Provision Services (7503)
Relevant Laws:
Article 24 of the Fair Trade Law
Summary:
1. The Fair Trade Commission (the Commission) received a complaint from Fu Hua International Market Development Consultancy Co., Ltd. (complainant). In the complaint, complainant claimed that Hunter Humen-Resources Consulting Ltd. (Hunter) had flagrantly and repeatedly reproduced job listings from complainant's "104 Job Bank" web site (www.104.com.tw) in the job wanted section of Hunter's own web site "37 Job Bank" (www.37.com.tw). This conduct misled job seekers into signing up with Hunter's web site under the misconception that Hunter's web site had numerous corporate clients with job openings. On the other hand, recruiting employers were deceived into believing that a large numbers of job seekers had signed up with Hunter and therefore executed agreements with Hunter for the placement of job listings. Hunter brazenly appropriated job listing information from the complainant's web site and represented the information as its own in order to attract more visits to its site, increase hit rate of its site, and increase its advertising revenues. Hunter's conduct constituted a free ride on others to secure illegitimate profits as well as a breach of business ethics capable of affecting order of trade. Hunter's conduct was in violation of Article 24 of the Fair Trade Law. The Commission conducted an investigation and found that the number of Internet services is expanding rapidly at present and that a given enterprise may simultaneously post job listings on several different Internet job sites. A service provider may conclude agreements with clients to publish job listing for a fee or for free, yet still be acting competitively if the service provider does not misappropriate information of others. If however a service provider simply reproduces job listings from another web site without making a reasonable effort to win over clients, the service provider is guilty of defrauding its trading counterparts and extracted the fruits of a competitor's labor, which constitute acts of unfair competition. 2. The Commission engaged in an investigation and found that Hunter had clearly reproduced information from complainant's web site in violation of Article 24 of the Fair Trade Law. The Commission's findings were: (1) The complainant submitted information from ten business enterprises and claimed that Hunter had reproduced job listings from these enterprises from Complainant's "104 Job Bank" web site. Complainant also maintained that Hunter posted this information in the job wanted section of Hunter's "37 Job Bank" web site. Although Hunter argued that the ten business enterprises in question had agreed to Hunter's posting of their job openings, Hunter was able to produce authorizations from only nine of these business enterprises. Hunter never submitted an authorization from the tenth firm, Tzu Ch'eng Accounting Firm. Tzu Ch'eng stated that, in addition to "104 Job Bank," it had provided company information and job descriptions to only one other web site, "1111 Job Bank" (www.1111.com.tw) on one occasion in March 2000. It is thus plainly evident that the job listings for Tzu Ch'eng Accounting cited in the complaint as found on "37 Job Bank" were reproduced from the complainant's "104 Job Bank" web site. (2) Upon further investigation, the Commission found that, except for the authorization from Chun Ta Electronics, all other authorizations submitted by Hunter did not contain the corporate seals of the respective companies. Also, except the authorizations from Li Yi Technologies and Chih Yuan Technologies, all other authorizations failed to show the names of the relevant person in charge at the respective companies. The Commission also visited Polaris Securities, Chun Ta Electronics, and Yu Hsuan Technologies. Yu Hsuan Technologies denied that it had ever execute the authorization in question, while Polaris and Chun Ta Electronics claimed that although they had faxed executed authorizations back to Hunter on 11 November 1999, the section of the authorization form reading "posting period: From _________ (Date) to _____________ (Date)" had been subsequently filled out by Hunter. Chun Ta Electronics produced a copy of the authorization that it had faxed to Hunter as evidence. Thus the nine authorizatio ns clearly were obtained from these business enterprises after the Commission had requested Hunter to respond to the allegations launched against it in the Commission's letter of 28 October 1999. In addition, Hunter had also filled in the dates of the posting period on the authorizations itself. Moreover, three of the enterprises in question stated that they had provided corporate information and job listings exclusively to the complainant and had never provided such information to Hunter or any other employment service agency other than complainant. Therefore information on these three companies cited in the complainant as found on "37 Job Bank" was plainly reproduced by Hunter from complainant's web site. (3) The Commission also considered Hunter's testimony before the Commission. Hunter stated that after obtaining authorization from a client, it occasionally directly copied that client's job listing information from other web sites. Hunter believed that because job listing information was more or less the same, such copying did not constitute a violation of the law. The Commission also considered the fact that in the company description posted on complainant's web site by complainant's clien Li Yi Technologies, the word yi ["one or "a"] had been inadvertently left out of the text "1987, a group of experts from Taiwan and abroad..." before the word "group." This same yi was also missing from the Li Yi's company description posted on Hunter's web site. In view of these facts, the Commission found that there was sufficient evidence to determine that Hunter had reproduced job listings from complainant's "104 Job Bank." 3. The Commission concluded Hunter extracted and improperly duplicated job listings for corporations that had executed agreements with complainant's web site. Hunter did so in order to increase the amount of information on its own web site. This practice constituted deception of recruiting companies and job seekers. It was also an obviously unfair conduct capable of affecting the trading order. Having determined that Hunter had violated Article 24 of the Fair Trade Law, the Commission imposed a fine of NT$500,000 against Hunter in accordance with Article 41 of the Fair Trade Law. Appendix: Hunter Humen-Resources Consulting Ltd.'s Uniform Invoice Number: 84787593 Summarized by Sun Ya-chuan; Supervised by Hung Te-ch'ang